I have to admit my complete surprise when Distrotube watched, commented on my youtube response to his video and subscribed to my channel. It’s not very often in Linux youtube land people respond to criticism in a mature fashion, if they even do at all. This has totally raised my respect levels for him.
Before people get hasty, this isn’t a backflip. I stand completely by what I said, and even though I accurately surmised what he would proffer as his reason for the video and don’t quite believe it, I’m sure he stands by his video too.
This, this is exactly what I have spoken about many times. Who cares if we disagree? Who cares if I put out an opinion and somebody challenges me on it? Discussion that isn’t inhibited by people with delicate feelings and snowflake dispositions can only help nigh on anything.
So, hats off to Distrotube for responding to me. We may disagree again in the future but respect for each others opinion on these such things should hopefully yield positive outcomes.
I don’t want to link to the video I’m about to discuss, but for context, I will.
Oh, let me counteth the way thoust has offended thee.
First of all, like with any shitty “journalism” or hack job, it’s dead easy to paint somebody in a negative light with a montage of handpicked footage. This isn’t clever, or even offer any sort of insight. Anyone who has looked into Linus or Stallman would have seen this stuff a dozens times over. It’s relevance on their contribution to Free and Open Source Software and where FOSS and Linux is today? Fucking zero.
Also, where in the pantheon of Linux proponents does Distrotube fall? Who the hell is he to be even casting aspersions like this? Should he speak for us? Not a chance.
One handsome dude and Richard Stallman.
I’ve met Stallman. I travelled 700kms to watch him speak in person and have exchanged many emails with him debating a great many subjects. There’s plenty he says that I strongly object to, but does that diminish his accomplishments in regards to Free Software and the movement it spawned? Not in the slightest.
Let’s remember, Distrotube is a guy who was sacked from his job quit his job after being accused of allegedly harassing a black lady in his store. By his own account, that wasn’t his intention and meant no offense, and I believe him. Why then, should we as viewers and subscribers, allow him to “throw shade” at absolute key players in the FOSS and GNU/Linux world when we could just as easily cast shadows over that same person?
Word to the wise champ. Show a bit of fucking class and respect for the people who make the very existence of your little youtube channel possible. Lots of solid comments left on the video if you care to read, I hope the common sense starts to sink in.
Messed with my blog, and hosed it. Should have backed it up before I did that, but with only a couple of posts I didn’t end up bothering. Luckily I had a backup of the previous iteration, so I just restored it and pulled my posts out of the database for the newer one and added to the old one.
So here we are.
Have created an bootable Gentoo USB to try on a troublesome HP ProBook I have at home that seems to be in a committed relationship with UEFI.
Well the VM on my workstation is done. Not a great achievement or anything, I’ve installed gentoo dozens of times, but in watching some recent videos including the series mentioned in a previous post, I could definitely refine my gentoo usage a bit. In recent years I’ve been lazy and relied upon genkernel, and using auto-unmask and dispatch-conf instead of properly defining a package.use when required.
So, I plan to re-watch those mammoth long videos again taking notes on various things I do or don’t do now. Then, I will do a new install, adhering to these new methods when needed and see what the difference is. I do wish I could use gentoo as my daily driver but currently at home this isn’t a possibility for now at least. Will see what happens.
So with my new found Gentoo vigor, I’m running up a VM at work. I always end up wanting to use it after a break from it. At home it can be troublesome to find the time required for system maintenance and patching. I have always been interested in getting more involved with the Gentoo project, and a package tester seems to be the best way to get stuck in, so I may pursue that.
Another night where I can’t get to sleep properly. Might as well write another post.
gentoo
Still my favourite Linux distro and every few months I search youtube for any recent videos that have been uploaded covering it. Recently I found a good video series on it’s installation. I’ve installed it a bunch of times but I enjoy seeing other people’s methodology and can always pick up little tips and tricks.
The series is on the channel of Zebedee Boss and currently has 3 parts. They are long, but worth it. See Part 1 below.
arch
One of the other golden children when it comes to Linux for me. I’m currently running it on my Linode VPS and as you would expect, it runs great.
There has been some gap in time since I’ve used it, enough of a gap you find that the AUR helper yaourt is no longer being developed. A quick google found yay to be highly recommended as yaourts replacement.
Being a minimal VPS I did have to install a couple of extra packages first.
# pacman -S binutils # pacman -S base-devel $ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git $ cd yay $ makepkg -si
Then you can search and install away just like the old days.
$ yay -Ss <package to search for> $ yay -S <package to install>
And then to update all the packages
$ yay
Pretty nifty stuff, but that’s Linux through and through.
There’s a lot to be said about the Linux community, good and bad. We definitely all like to revel in the openness and freedoms that have taken Free and Open Source Software to such dizzying and world dominating heights. There is, however, a darker side that can’t be denied and it’s all centered around the perception of a behavior that is much maligned by many Linux users. What is it you ask?
Elitism.
Some of you may say it’s not a perception, it’s a very real thing, and for sure there people who are elitists and revere that moniker. Unfortunately, as the increase of distributions has gone on, and the popularity of the more obscure ones has grown, people now lust after all the pretty rice they see on the unix porn subreddit. This drives them towards distributions like Void, Arch and Gentoo. Sadly when they dive into the worlds of these more advanced distributions they hit a brick wall very fast, and often leads to the propagation of a few misconceptions.
“I got told to RTFM, what a bunch of elitist jerks!!”
Sorry, but reading the manual is something we should all be doing. People pour hours into documentation only to have it ignored and then people jump onto IRC, forums or reddit asking for help with stuff that is easily answered by reading the man pages.
“This is way too hard, why don’t you do it like ubuntu does!!”
If that’s the type of system you like to use, then use ubuntu. All the packages you see on riced out systems on reddit are available just as readily in ubuntu as they are in Arch. The uncomfortable truth people need to admit to themselves is they WANT to run Arch, and have all the prettiness, but either don’t want to put in the work and learn or simply just do not yet have enough Linux experience to make the transition.
An amatuer boxer would never just jump in the ring with Mike Tyson. He’s far to experienced and difficult an opponent. An amatuer would have no right to complain about it being unfair. The same applies here. Without the relevent experience and technical knowledge, users have no right to disparrage a distribution or it’s users because it is too hard for them to use. You choose a distribution based on your requirements and its strengths and limitations. Don’t blame others for making the wrong choice.
“ubuntu is derived from Debian so it is Debian”
Wrong. ubuntu is it’s own distro and there are many other respins. Respins of respins even using Mint as an example. Luckily the ubuntu community is pretty helpful and users can get access to a lot of information and assistance, but this is seldom the case. People respin distros for their own purposes and release them to others which is great, but one cannot make the mistake of thinking it is one and the same as the original release. There are almost always differences, and as soon as there is a single one you are asking people to support something not of their own, which is not a fair or realistic expectation.
Of course, some communities are more militant on their policing of support requests for alternative spins of their distribution, and from what I’ve seen in particular in the Gentoo and Arch communities, this has usually been borne from multiple bad experiences in the past and forum spanning when the creator of their respins etc does not provide support.
“$distro sucks because of X….”
Nobody is forced to like one distro over another. It drives me fucking insane when people refer to one distro or another as broken because a package doesn’t work or “it’s too hard” etc etc.
Some distributions are developed, built and distributed with instructions to be a certain way because that is the vision the developers have for it. Don’t be a cry baby because it doesn’t suit your use case. Switch to something that does.
So, how do we fix this?
We can’t. Human nature is human nature and this is how people have, are and always will act. I like everyone else have distros I prefer over others, and will defend those reasons, their respective communities and the way things are done. I do also much rather prefer people to use Linux and BSD over anything else so if ubuntu or SUSE floats your boat, go for it.
Just be aware that if you are choosing a distro, especially when stepping up the difficulty level, more advanced users have a higher expectation of competancy, support and bug reporting ettiquette and the general opinion that the best thing for a user to do is work on being a better problem solver. You learn more and in turn can also better support the community.
